Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Enoch Brater, Editor

Publication Year: 2007

No American playwright is more revered on the international stage than Arthur Miller. In Arthur Miller’s Global Theater—a fascinating collection of new essays by leading international critics and scholars—readers learn how and why audiences around the world have responded to the work of the late theatrical icon. With perspectives from diverse corners of the globe, from Israel to Japan to South Africa, this groundbreaking volume explores the challenges of translating one of the most American of American playwrights and details how disparate nations have adapted meaning in Miller’s most celebrated dramas. An original and engaging collection that will appeal to theater aficionados, scholars, students, and all those interested in Miller and his remarkable oeuvre, Arthur Miller’s Global Theater illustrates how dramas such as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge developed a vigorous dialogue with new audiences when they crossed linguistic and national borders. In these times when problems of censorship, repressive regimes, and international discord are increasingly in the news, Arthur Miller’s voice has never been more necessary as it continues to be heard and celebrated around the world. Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature at the University of Michigan. His other books include Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works and Arthur Miller’s America.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Cross-Cultural Encounters: Arthur Miller and the International Theater Community

When Arthur Miller died at his Connecticut home on February 10, 2005, surrounded by close members of his family, the report of his passing was treated in the national media as a major event. America’s most enduring playwright was eighty-nine years old. No one could remember when an obituary of a leading cultural figure had appeared above the fold on ...

PERSPECTIVES

Arthur Miller’s Israel and Israel’s Arthur Miller

In September 1988, five months after Israel officially opened its fiftieth year of statehood celebrations, Ha’aretz, the Tel Aviv–based liberal daily newspaper, published “Waiting for the Teacher,” a nineteen-stanza, free verse poem written by Arthur Miller to mark the occasion.1 The text is both personal and political, brief vignettes from the writer’s experiences...

Traveling Man, Traveling Culture: Death of a Salesman and Post-Mao Chinese Theater

That the 1983 Chinese production of Death of a Salesman, staged by the Beijing People’s Art Theater under the direction of Arthur Miller himself, marks a significant moment of Sino-American cross-cultural collaboration is not to be doubted. However, the nature and direction of significance do not always correspond with the way previous accounts ...

Directing Miller in Italy

Arthur Miller’s stage history in Italy coincides with two notable events: the widening of national repertoires to include contemporary foreign dramaturgy and the opportunity for a modern way of staging plays in a revitalized theater. After twenty years of fascist dictatorship, which meant the banishment of contemporary foreign works from Italian the-...

The history of modern South Africa is replete with ironies, more often grim than comic. Not surprisingly, the political complexities of the country’s recent societal transformations have shaped the history of the production and reception of Arthur Miller’s plays in much the same way as they have determined South African cultural life in general. To trace ...

Not All One Song: Arthur Miller in the German Theater

December 17, 1982, seemed to mark the nadir of Arthur Miller’s standing in the German theater. On the evening of that day Peter Iden, the critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the four well-respected national dailies, entered the stalls of the Schauspielhaus in Nuremberg to attend the German premiere of The American Clock. The fact that no theater in ...

A Dominican View: An Interview with Darryl V. Jones

In November 1995, Darryl V. Jones directed Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Source Theatre Company for a standard four-week run in Washington, DC. Enoch Brater spoke with him, on a telephone hook up arranged by WUOM-Radio on September 21, 2004, about the director’s decision to reset the play in a community of Dominican immigrants. Enoch Brater: How did you arrive at the idea of transforming Miller’s ...

RETROSPECTIVES

Arthur Miller’s Dialogue with Ireland

Any discussion of Arthur Miller in connection with Ireland falls into two halves, for it has been—both explicitly and implicitly—a dialogue. Miller’s dialogue with Ireland has included both his own work interpreted on the Irish stage as well as the Irish dramatic tradition influencing his own dramatic practice. The latter culminated in his 1998 decision ...

Miller, Mingei, and Japan

Cultural contacts and transactions are often determined by chance: when we consider the dramatic contingencies of translation, production, reception, political climate, social situation, and publication practices, the possibilities for failure seem unlimited, especially in dealing with two cultures so different from each other as those of Japan and America. ...

The Reception of Miller’s Theater in Spain

When Arthur Miller’s plays reached Spain in the early 1950s, the Spanish literary scene was still deeply undermined by the effects of the Spanish civil war. The misery and poverty that beset Spain during a long period after the war and the isolation in which it found itself proved to be a great handicap to the survival of the revolutionary theatrical forms intro-...

Arthur Miller in Buenos Aires

To speak of the fortunes of Arthur Miller in Buenos Aires implies a brief survey of the history of the theater and of the city. To what extent have Miller’s plays and their reception by the press accompanied and unwittingly reflected the irregular developments of Argentine culture? Miller’s theater covers approximately the second half of the twentieth century. ...

Miller in Scandinavia Focus on Denmark

In his autobiography, Timebends, and again during a major interview held on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday, Arthur Miller laments that he has often had more recognition abroad than he has had in his own country.1 He attributed this in part to the loss of a genuine theater culture in the United States and to the fact that European theater is still heavily ...

The Crucible: Three British Encounters

In Timebends, Arthur Miller recounts hearing with pleasure from George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, London, about the enthusiastic reception of his 1956 production of The Crucible by its “eager young audience.”1 I was in that audience and can bear witness to not only our enthusiasm for the play but the kind of messages we took from it. We ...

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